[Regia-NA] Crossbows

[Carolyn Priest-Dorman]

This is (surprise!) a military topic that interest me.  I have a 60-lb 
rolling nut crossbow and used to be pretty good with it.  Phil wrote:

>Alm states that crossbows were used at the sieges of Senlis in 947 and 
>Verdun in 985, although his reference seems to be to another secondary source.

Payne-Gallwey put me onto the original source for this, which is Richer de 
St. Remy's _Historia_ (tenth century).  The original is of course in Latin, 
but a facing-page French edition is in the Vassar Library (ed. Robert 
Latouche).  I translated the section about the siege of Senlis from the 
Latin for the SCA periodical _Early Period_, but that was over a decade ago 
and I can't find my stash of them right now.  When I do I'll repost.

Egon Harmuth's _Die Armbrust:  Ein Handbuch_ has a black and white Biblical 
illustration of the siege (?=Belagerung) of Jerusalem (presumably the 
Babylonian one?) from a French manuscript of the 10th century.  He also 
shows an 8th or 9th century nut and handle from "English" finds.  Footnotes 
say one is an 8th century nut from _Ancient Scottish Lake-Dwellings or 
Crannogs_ by Robert Munro (Edinburgh, 1882) and the other is a 9th century 
handle and nut from Southgrove Farm, Burbage, Wiltshire.

MacGregor more or less concurs on these dates.  He says the Scottish one 
(from Buston Crannog, Strathclyde) could very well be that late, and that 
in any case they're most likely to be post-Roman.  See the section on 
crossbows in his _Bone Antler Ivory and Horn_ for more info.

I haven't seen anything about the rising pin mechanism in this period, though.


Carolyn Priest-Dorman              Þóra Sharptooth
  http://www.cs.vassar.edu/~capriest/thora.html